I found a video https://youtu.be/5_PjCwMEdSY. It looks like the crane elevates itself before a new concrete floor has forms built and is poured.
Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)
171–180 of 312 posts
Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a fun story about union influence in NYC (with a little twist I hope you'll indulge[1]): In 2005, I moved into a 19th-floor apartment in lower Manhattan. My girlfriend and I spent about 12 hours at IKEA getting everything needed to furnish the place. By the time we finished taking (2!) taxies back from Jersey with all my stuff, it was about midnight on a Friday night. It took another hour or so to schlep every…
Next time carry it up one flight of stairs and put it in the lift out of sight of the doorman.
LOL this.
I remember a long time ago there was a team that needed some very expensive hardware from sun (think several 100k).
The manager of the group could NOT get approval for the equipment. It was a massive technicality as another department was supposed to buy setup and "run" the equipment and they refused for a number of reasons.
The manager in question figured out that he could sign a PO up to $7000. A large number of PO's later the server was to be delivered.
This, to say the least, was going to be a bigger problem. Though a space had been secured for it (in a server room no less) getting it into the building was going to be an issue.
They ended up bringing it in on a weekend, only to find the freight elevator locked, and the rack it came in unable to fit in the normal elevator for people.
The manager, his team, the sun sales man and the delivery driver took the whole thing to bits in the lobby. There were parts EVERYWHERE and a rather bemused security guard who was baffled as to why this was happening this way.
It all turned out fine in the end, the manager wasn't fired (promoted in fact), the salesman got his commission, and the team got the equipment they needed.
If I were a betting man that driver was a union guy and ended up with time and 1/2 for the insanity on a saturday!
Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)
#173This is sort of like how when the waterless urinal was first commercialized, the plumbers union blocked it from getting approved in the general building code. Eventually a compromised was reached that involves requiring a plumber to draw an water line (unutilized) to every water-less install. Unions for skilled, high-pay jobs in highly regulated industries really extract a lot of questionable value from society.
Union acts in it's member's interests: "Terrible, we shouldn't allow this". Corporation acts in it's own interests: "Well you can't blame them for that".
One of these organizations produces goods and services. The other is, more often than not, just another parasitic middleman.
Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's very important to be able to let people make these decisions. It's inefficient to add a water line if it's never going to be used. You might believe I'm going to use it, but I might know I'm not going to use it. Maybe you're right, but I am the one paying the bill to tear off finishings to run water lines in the walls.
The problem is that cities don't want buildings torn down every 10 years because it's cheaper for the buyer to just rebuild from the ground up than to fight what essentially amounts to a heap of technical debt. Well-constructed buildings can last centuries: future-proofing is a pretty big deal.
Why would a city care? That's just more permitting money and local jobs.
Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're still fascinated by the properties of Roman concrete which has, in many cases, survived 2000 years mostly unscathed. Meanwhile brutalist buildings from the 1950s are crumbling.
Careful of survivorship bias here. Of course we don't see any Roman buildings that crumbled 50 years after construction.
They really did use better construction, though. Unreinforced opus caementicum (with particular kinds of Italian volcanic ash) can't be built as tall as reinforced OPC, but lasts infinitely longer. Of course, OPC could last longer if it didn't use ferrous reinforcement...
Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Saying "the problem is not the unions" is as wide-brush as saying they are the problem; unions have some good causes but the core of their existence is to keep employees employed, sometimes that means important jobs that should exist and sometimes its a cancer that stops a business from profiting or stopping the creation of new ones or the advance of technology (think taxi drivers vs self-driving cars)
I don't know how to tell you this but there's no such thing as a car that can drive itself.
I don't know how to tell you this, but go to Japan and be proven spectacularly wrong. Or... go to SFO and see the air train that's driverless too?
Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
And when people advocate for programmers unionizing, I don't see why we'd be any different. There'd be people employed doing X, a programmer would make something to automate X, and "our" union would be trying to save their job.
Just throwing in another reason why programmer unions don't make a lot of sense: licensing. It makes sense to license electricians, crane operators, doctors, lawyers, and many other professions who do safety-critical work. Only a very small minority of programmers work on software that could actually hurt someone (at Boeing, Toyota, etc...). There's no reason to create a legal barrier to entry for programming.
There are Medical health records in Postgres, doctor's office software running on windows and linux, Barcode readers at the local pharmacy, safety critical code in a git repo. If you are going to draw a line around safety critical software the dependency graph is much larger than you might think.
Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the unions. On my way to work, I pass by a giant inflatable rat inflated by a gas motor that's hauled around by a truck. It's rather annoying when its tail gets loose and covers the sidewalk, as can happen on windy days when it's not tied down appropriately. It's probably 10 or 12 feet tall, at least, and the tail is maybe 12 feet long or longer. (3 feet is about one meter for those in metric land). It's parked…
this is not confined to NYC or cities. My cousins have run a successful commercial roofing business in a Mid Western state for decades. It is common that on any public building they work on to have an OSHA inspector come out on day if not each day, to have a local sheriff be called, and even once INS. All because this family owned business is non union and has always been. the sad part, this is a business which has n…
But in this case the union's job is specifically to make your cousins' life more difficult. If you don't want pressure from the unions... unionize your shop.
Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's very important to be able to let people make these decisions. It's inefficient to add a water line if it's never going to be used. You might believe I'm going to use it, but I might know I'm not going to use it. Maybe you're right, but I am the one paying the bill to tear off finishings to run water lines in the walls.
We do this in lots of places. For example, it's against building code in most places to build a house without power grid feeds, running water, or septic/sewer access. Sometimes there are exceptions for "tiny houses" but other times not. You yourself might want to go totally off the grid and/or rustic, but the reality is that you are likely not going to be the last person who ever lives in that house. Maybe you don't…
I suppose I didn't make it explicit, but my point is that these regulations can be costly and/or stifling for a future benefit that may never come.
Costly in the original example would be that waterless urinals are installed for the life of the building.
Stifling in your example would be because much land will never be used because it's infeasible to bring power, water, and septic. Someone could have a home, but nothing will happen instead due to the regulation.
Just to meet your last point: - Is today's weirdo tomorrow's visionary? - Is a weirdo not allowed to create what he wants if he's not hurting anyone?
Re: Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that cities don't want buildings torn down every 10 years because it's cheaper for the buyer to just rebuild from the ground up than to fight what essentially amounts to a heap of technical debt. Well-constructed buildings can last centuries: future-proofing is a pretty big deal.
Why would a city care? That's just more permitting money and local jobs.
Are you familiar with the concept of opportunity cost? Effort spend redoing things all the time instead of improving and building new things is not making a city better.